Markeshia Ricks Photo
Elder Walter R. Oliver Jr. told a diverse crowd gathered at Varick Memorial AME Zion Church that the 21-year-old white man who shot and killed nine black people in a historic Charleston AME church this week had hoped his actions would start a war that would pit white people against black people.
“Turn to your neighbor,” Oliver said to people in the pews, “and say: ‘It backfired.’”
“We’ve crossed all types of lines to to be here tonight,” said Oliver, who leads New Haven’s Ebenezer Chapel. “His plan didn’t work, and I am so glad that we’ve come together in the spirit of love to continue to pray together.”
People of different racial and ethnic backgrounds and of different faith traditions joined hands and hearts Friday evening at the Dixwell Avenue church to remember the lives of the nine people killed in Charleston, and to pray for peace and justice.
Emmanuel AME church members Susie Jackson; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton; DePayne Doctor; Ethel Lance; Daniel Simmons Sr.; Clementa Pinckney; Cynthia Hurd; and Tywanza Sanders were gunned down by Dylann Roof during a Wednesday night bible study.
Such study is a common occurrence at many churches across the country, and the fact that Roof sat in on the study before the shooting has not only rocked the African Methodist Episcopal Church community, but many faith communities.
The Rev. Orsella R. Hughes-Cooper (pictured) of New Haven’s Bethel AME Church reminded the crowd that the denomination’s roots are in fighting racism and seeking justice.
“When Richard Allen and Absalom Jones (AME founders) chose not to stand, praying in the balcony, but to kneel at the altar where they were not allowed, they did not take their anger out on anyone, but they took their anger and used it to start the Free African Society,” she said to applause. “Those were my friends…and I’ve had to fight being angry.”
She’s said she is winning that fight through faith. “I will not be afraid to gather with saints,” she said. “I will not be afraid to lift my hands.”
Rabbi Herbert Brockman of Congregation Mishkan Israel said that the massacre in Charleston didn’t just happen to one church in one city. “It happened to all of us,” he said. “This happened because of one man’s madness and we must rise from our mourner’s couch and confront that madness.
“it wasn’t God who forsook the Charleston nine, but we who refuse to confront racism, hatred, violence and mental illness,” Brockman (pictured) said. “We must become co-workers with God for justice, righteousness and peace. If we don’t, nothing will change and their deaths will have been in vain. And if that happens, shame on us.”
The Rev. Elderen Morrison, pastor of Varick, grew up in Lake Wiley, S.C. He said that such a senseless act of violence can happen there because it is a state that “touts being a beautiful place with smiling faces, but those faces mask centuries of hurts, fears and discrimination.”
But he said his heart grieved because “I know that this can happen anywhere. I know tonight that it very well could be in New Haven. That is how quickly life can be taken from us.”
Morrison (pictured) said he spoke to the graduating class at Amistad High School and he apologized.
“I had to apologize to the graduating seniors because we are loosing them in a world that is still struggling with the sins of the past century and trying to tell them that things have changed,” he said. “They have not changed and they cannot change when nine lives can be taken in a church in a state that proudly flies the Confederate flag, and its streets are named after Confederate generals.”
And it was the young people who were upper most in the mind of the Rev. Jerry Streets (pictured), pastor of Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, who led the closing prayer at the Friday night vigil. Streets called to the front every young person from aged 1‑month to old enough to be in college. He asked the congregation to encircle the young people “because they need all the support that we can give them.”
When he learned that Roof was just barely an adult, Streets said before the prayer, “I thought, ‘How many more young people out there are like him? Who taught him how to hate?’”
Streets said “the assault on black bodies, black psyches” has been relentless in the last few years.
And while the crowd could take solace in the fact that Roof was in police custody and is now in the hands of the justice system, Streets asked the assembled crowd to think about one other thing: “What happens over time when people have to play dead in order to survive? What does it say about our nation and our future?”